Richard's Sermon for the annual service of Remembrance and Thanksgiving for the Faithful Departed (All Souls): 29th October 2017

All Souls 2017

I am often asked whether taking funerals is the worst part of the role I have. Of course it isn’t ever easy but taking a funeral  is always actually a great privilege and because of that many ministers will say that they are among the most worthwhile things we do.  Besides, I always reply that it is far worse for those who are bereaved than it is for me; and so I am very aware on an occasion such as this, looking out at your faces and the stories that they reveal (or hide) that this will have been a difficult year for  you. You are the ones in the crucible, whether the one you love was 9 or 89. You are the ones touched most vigorously by grief. You are the ones struggling to come to terms with the void in your lives.

So I don’t want to let this occasion pass without saying thank you for being here to make your remembrances in public, to say your ‘thankyous’ for the years shared alongside others doing the same. Just being here is an act of courage in itself; and I am always humbled by the way that the loss of someone so dear is so often met with dignity, courage and patience.

Facing suffering or grief with virtue, being able to hold together in tension all that life sends our way, good and bad is what I want  to speak to you about today. After all, the death of a loved one is one of the most profound experiences we will ever go through. How we get through it and the mark that it leaves on us goes a long way to defining who we are.

We soon discover that, trite though it often sounds, life goes on. At first that in itself may seem all wrong.

It is more than 20 years since Four Weddings and a Funeral, but the W.H. Auden poem that was made famous by the film still has the power to haunt because it speaks of the sense of outrage that there can be that the normal stuff of life doesn’t stop just because our world seems as if it has ended.

“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. “

He makes the same point, in a slightly different vein in another poem – about how, of course, the continuity of ordinary life goes on around us, when all we might feel is great discontinuity.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

Twenty years ago I was at a wedding in Windsor. It was the 5^th September 1997 and I can tell you the exact date because it was the day before the funeral of Diana Princess of Wales. Inside the hotel there was quite proper joy and celebration. Just across the road a long snaking queue of mourners waited to sign the book of condolence in Windsor castle. I wonder what they though of the smiling faces they could glimpse through the hotel window.  There was joy and there was grief. The Royal Standard hung at half mast above the great tower and mid way through the afternoon the most beautiful rainbow appeared directly above it. There was a sign of mourning, there was a sign of hope.

Life and death, suffering and jubilation, bereavement and joy; how often we live with these held in tension – being able to do so is part of what being fully human is all about.

One of the reasons that I am a minister of Christian religion (apart from the belief that this is what I believe God has called me to) is that in Jesus Christ - in his life, and especially in his death and resurrection, we see the one who makes whole those two facets of our existence, those two facets of what makes us fully human and fully alive; and I just want to put people in touch with him.

I said especially his death and resurrection because it is the cross and the empty tomb that enable us to grapple with how it is ok to be both joyful and grieving at the same time. For the cross of Jesus reveals a God who takes us, and who takes himself, into the depths of what it is to suffer, what it is to lose the one we love, what it is to watch them die; who takes us into the heart of human darkness.

Yet he is also a God who doesn’t end the story there, who knows that apart from those first apostles, everyone else who encounters the cross does so through the lens of the resurrection; knows that the pain, evil, death not cancelled out by the resurrection but rather transcended.

It is possible to hold them together. Life does go on. Joy can break out. The void left by the end of the life of the one we love will always be there, not filled, not cancelled; but we discover that their end doesn’t bring the end, that we can hold grief and joy together.